The Queen Mother (33 page)

O
N THE FIRST
day of her married life the Duchess of York awoke at 11, had breakfast in bed and looked at all the papers. She still felt exhausted and did not get up until lunchtime. She dressed herself comfortably in an old blue tweed suit – to the dismay of her maid. ‘Poor Catherine is miserable,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘because I won’t wear anything new – I hate new things!’
¹
That afternoon the Duke and Duchess sat together in the sun, strolled around Mrs Greville’s garden and sat down to write to their parents and friends.

The Duchess told her mother she was worried that she had been exhausted by the events of the last three months. ‘I could not say anything to you about how utterly miserable I was at leaving you and Mike & David & father. I could not
ever
have said it to you – but you know I love you more than anybody in the world mother, and you do know it, don’t you? Bertie adores you too, & he is being too marvellous to me, & so thoughtful. He really is a darling – I
hope
you all like him.’
²
Lady Strathmore replied at once, thanking her for her ‘
darling
’ letter – ‘I just love it & shall always keep it.’ She continued in a way which exposed the depth of her feelings. ‘I won’t say what it means to me to give you up to Bertie – but I think you know that you are by
far
the most precious of all my children, & always will be. I do
love
Bertie – & think very highly of his
character
, but above everything I love his really worshipping
you
, & I go on telling myself that when I get low about you. However I do wish he was not a Royalty – but his own dear plain self, (I don’t mean plain in
looks
.)’ She ended by saying that she liked the Prince of Wales immensely, ‘but he is not a
patch
on Bertie!’
³

The Duke wrote also to ‘Darling Lady Strathmore’ thanking her and Lord Strathmore for letting him marry Elizabeth. ‘You know how
I love her & will always take care of her, & I do hope you will not look upon me as a thief in having taken her from you. I know only too well what Elizabeth is to you, & to me she is everything.’
⁴
Lady Strathmore’s reply was reassuring, saying she felt ‘very much at peace about you & my darling Eliz
^th
who I know is so very happy with you’.
⁵

Letters were dispatched to the Duke’s parents too. The Duke told the King what happiness it had brought him to be allowed to marry Elizabeth, and thanked him for all his kindness since their engagement. He hoped that his parents had been satisfied with the wedding arrangements ‘as I was so anxious that everybody would be pleased & of course especially you & Mama. I am afraid you must both have been very tired after it all.’
⁶
To his mother, the Duke wrote, ‘I do hope you will not miss me very much, though I believe you will as I have stayed with you so much longer really than the brothers. I am very very happy now with my little darling so perhaps our parting yesterday was made easier for me but still I did feel a pang at leaving my home.’
⁷

Queen Mary replied that she and his father would indeed miss him, as ‘you have always been such a good son,’ and ‘we always turned to you in difficulties, knowing how reliable you always are.’ But their sadness was softened by the knowledge that Elizabeth ‘will make you such a perfect little wife’, and they were already devoted to her.
⁸
Similarly the King wrote to ‘Dearest Bertie’ to congratulate him once more on having ‘such a charming and delightful wife as Elizabeth’. ‘I am sure you will both be very happy together … I miss you very much & regret your having left us, but now you will have your own home which I hope will be as happy as the one you have left.’ He went on to make a pointed contrast between Prince Albert and his eldest son, the Prince of Wales. ‘You have always been so sensible & easy to work with & you have always been ready to listen to any advice & to agree with my opinions about people & things, that I feel we have always got on very well together (very different to dear David).’ He was quite certain that ‘Elizabeth will be a splendid partner in your work & share with you & help you in all you have to do.’
⁹

Many years later, King George VI’s biographer John Wheeler-Bennett commented, ‘No prophecy could have been more completely fulfilled, no expression of confidence more entirely justified. The
Duchess was not only to be the partner of his happiness but his inspiration of encouragement in the face of adversity, his enduring source of strength in joy and sadness.’
¹⁰

*

T
HEY WERE
comfortable at Polesden Lacey.
^*
A large mansion near Dorking in Surrey, it was built in 1821 to designs by Thomas Cubitt, and the exterior retained some of its Regency flavour. After the Grevilles bought it in 1906, however, the interior was redesigned to Mrs Greville’s taste by Mewes and Davis, the architects of the Ritz hotels in London and Paris. One of her additions was a grandiose saloon fitted with elaborate carved and gilded panelling dating from the early eighteenth century, and richly furnished with large mirrors and Persian carpets. The atmosphere she created was one of opulence and comfort. There were extensive gardens, tennis courts and a golf course, and the house was well supplied with all kinds of produce from the estate, on which there were cattle and sheep, vegetable gardens, orchards and hothouses. Mrs Greville was generous with staff, food and everything else her guests needed.

They walked around the golf course, the Duke with a club, they went to church in the rain on Sunday, they listened to gramophone records, they ‘Talked very hard’.
¹¹
And they enjoyed the unaccustomed privacy and solitude. They allowed one photographer to come and take pictures of them in order to deter all the others. On Thursday 3 May 1923, a hot day, reality intruded with a slightly unwelcome visit to London. They drove up to Bruton Street, where the Duchess ‘talked hard’ to her brothers David and Mike and to her mother. After lunch she and the Duke went to the Palace where she ‘argued in vain’ with
Commander Greig. The cause of this particular disagreement is not known, but she was apparently becoming impatient with her husband’s principal aide.
¹²

In the afternoon, to their relief, they were able to drive back to Polesden Lacey and went for a warm evening stroll in Mrs Greville’s garden, before writing more letters. On Monday 7 May they left the house and motored up to London, lunching with the Strathmores at Bruton Street. That evening the Duchess had a cocktail with Mike and then changed into her blue travelling suit. The Prince of Wales arrived and ‘We had a very gay dinner – & sang at the piano afterwards.’ Then they drove to Euston to take the 11 o’clock sleeper to Scotland.
¹³
The train pulled into Glamis station at 10 a.m. and the platform was thronged with well-wishers. The Duchess’s troop of Girl Guides, as well as the Boy Scouts and the local schoolchildren, were among those who had come to welcome them. ‘Very nice of them,’ she remarked.
¹⁴

Her parents had prepared a suite of rooms in the oldest part of the Castle for them, and these they used from now on. On the first floor, the sitting room had latticed windows on either side of the blue and white Dutch-tiled fireplace. There were eighteenth-century tapestries on the walls and Chippendale chairs for which Lady Strathmore had worked tapestry seats. In the main bedroom, the fringe around the top of the four-poster bed was embroidered with the names and birth dates of all Lady Strathmore’s children (and the dates on which Violet and Alec had died); the bed was covered with a quilt she had made. The dressing room had been converted into a bathroom for them, with another dressing room next door.

It was ‘delicious’ to be back at Glamis, as the Duchess wrote to Beryl; but the weather was dreadful – icy cold, with hail, sleet and snow showers.
¹⁵
Nevertheless they went out for walks, shot rabbits, visited friends in the neighbourhood or read, relaxed and wrote more letters. By the middle of the next week the Duchess had developed a ‘rather troublesome’ cough. Despite this, on Thursday 17 May they drove over to Cortachy Castle to lunch with the Airlie family and that evening, after playing bezique before dinner, they took the sleeper to London. The Duchess was touched by the crowd who gathered at the station to cheer them off.
¹⁶

Next morning her cough was worse; they went straight to Bruton Street for breakfast, and the doctor came and gave her cough mixture. In the evening they drove down to Frogmore House in the Home
Park at Windsor, which the King had lent them, as White Lodge was not yet ready. The cough was by now ‘
very
uncomfortable’. They spent the weekend resting at Frogmore, but were not constantly prudent. On Tuesday the Prince of Wales came to dine and then suggested they went dancing at the Embassy Club, ‘so we dashed up to London in his car, & joined Paul’s party there’. Among Prince Paul’s guests were the Prince of Wales’s friend Freda Dudley Ward, Sheila Loughborough,
^*
Alice Astor, Prince Serge Obolensky
^†
and Lord Cranborne. ‘Danced hard till 2.30. David sent us back in his car. Very tired & enjoyed it awfully. Coughed a good deal.’
¹⁷

The following morning, she recorded, ‘Woke up very tired. We are not used to dancing!’ On Friday 25 May she was diagnosed with whooping cough. ‘Most annoying, but glad to know what it is.’
¹⁸
It was in the papers the following day. ‘I hope Her Royal Highness likes Bananas,’ wrote the dowager Lady Bradford solicitously to Queen Mary, ‘for they are so good in whooping cough.’
¹⁹
The Duke told his mother that they could not come to her birthday party next day. ‘You can imagine how very disappointed we both are about it, as it is so unromantic to catch whooping cough on your honeymoon!’
²⁰

Meanwhile Queen Mary was still busying herself with the refurbishment of White Lodge. She acted from the best of motives – her own first married home had been furnished in advance by Maples on the orders of her future husband, in the mistaken belief that he was doing her a kindness.
^‡
No doubt she wanted to ensure not only that her old home retained its character but also that it would be suitably
elegant. It cannot have been easy, however, for the Duchess to feel at home in a house so dominated by her mother-in-law’s taste.

The young couple finally moved into White Lodge on 6 June. Together they arranged their possessions, old and new, fitting in as well as they could with the furniture that Queen Mary had chosen. The Duchess’s diary records a two-hour visit of inspection by her mother-in-law a month later. ‘We went
all
over the house till 5.15. Felt quite exhausted about the legs!’
²¹
She later confided to her mother that her bedroom was ‘HIDEOUS’, and asked if she could have two of her pictures from Glamis, one of them a Madonna, to hang on the walls.
²²
It was a small but very natural rebellion.

It quickly became clear that White Lodge was not ideal for a young couple in the public eye whose lives were centred in London. The house was big and expensive to run. Richmond Park was no longer the sylvan fastness that George II had enjoyed 200 years before, but a weekend attraction for thousands of people. Many of them wanted nothing so much as a glimpse of the new Duchess and her husband. So when they were at home, privacy was a problem. When they left it, distance was the difficulty.

The road to London was nothing like as crowded as it was to become, but it was busy nonetheless. After an afternoon or early-evening engagement, the Duke and Duchess often had to drive to Richmond to change into evening wear and then drive back to town. In the winter, fog often descended upon the Park and it was sometimes hard to find the house at all. Although they had rooms at Buckingham Palace which Queen Mary urged them to use whenever they wanted – ‘I have done my best to make them as nice as possible for Elizabeth,’ she wrote
²³
– they quickly began to wish they could move to London. But that was not easy, partly because of the need to avoid offending the King, let alone the Queen, and partly because delicate negotiations with the Crown Estate Commissioners and the Ministry of Works were involved. Royal expenditure may not then have been scrutinized as carefully as in later years, but it was an issue.

Three years were to pass before a suitable house in London could be found for them and the hurdles to moving were overcome. In the meantime the Duchess made the best of it. She invited D’Arcy Osborne, busy at the Foreign Office, to visit her – ‘So some time you must throw the Eastern question firmly aside, turn your most magic stone three times from East to West, & start for Richmond.’
²⁴
(She
and Osborne had a long-running whimsical dialogue about how magic stones could ward off trouble. As one historian wrote of Osborne, ‘he would have liked to believe in witches and the god Pan … with only a half-sceptical smile he wore a charm against cosmic rays.’)
²⁵

Despite its drawbacks, White Lodge gave the Duke and Duchess a degree of independence and freedom: they were able to entertain family and friends informally, to play tennis and to go out riding (which the Duchess enjoyed, remarking in her diary that she had not ridden for years).
²⁶
Nor did the distance prevent them from driving frequently to London to dine and dance with friends.

All this helped counterbalance the new restraints in the Duchess’s life. Entry into the Royal Family, with its rituals and its orderliness, really was a sort of golden incarceration. The young Duchess could no longer go shopping alone; she could not travel on trains alone, or on buses at all. She was no longer able to see her friends as spontaneously as she loved to do, and when she met them at Court or at official functions there was a certain distance imposed by the formality required of the Royal Family. Helen Hardinge commented in her memoirs that older members of Queen Mary’s entourage disapproved of the Duchess seeing ‘too much’ of her old friends, for fear that they would be too familiar towards her. As a result, Helen herself made a point of being ‘very formal and decorous – so that it took the Duchess of York some time after her marriage to come to terms with all our conventional efforts to treat her correctly’.
²⁷
Although later the Duchess was able to appoint friends to her entourage, her first lady in waiting was a stranger, a generation older and no doubt chosen by Queen Mary as someone whose experience would be helpful. She was Lady Katharine Meade,
^*
formerly lady in waiting to the Duchess of Albany. She received the lukewarm description ‘quite nice’ on her first appearance in the Duchess of York’s diary in June 1923; Helen Hardinge described her as a ‘well-meaning old cup of tea’,
²⁸
but she never became close to the Duchess and resigned in 1926.